The nights are longer It’s harder to hold the sun Take heart: Two more weeks — ptkh 120912
Author: Clio
An Experiment in Pronouns
Tee hated skim. Crystal knew that with all of ter heart: Tee hated Marcus, body and soul. The way that skee looked at tim, with that glib smirk, that cologne that skee wore in a cloud of sweet seduction, that swagger in sker step as skee stood by the coffee maker. And oh, how tee…
Haiku
December the ninth. A climate change souvenir: Rain, in Michigan — ptkh 120912
The Wanderer: The apple
The wanderer stopped at the side of the road, stooped down, and considered an apple that had settled itself into the muddy sluiceway. It did not appear to have come there naturally. There were apple trees in the distance, to be sure: Ghostly fingers reaching up into the late November sky, backed by a gray…
The abandoned dacha
That morning, I met with Oleg in the house in the valley at the bottom of the steep road that nobody with any sense would ever try to drive up, the one carved straight up the side of the hill because people in that part of the world had apparently never heard of switchbacks. I…
A Sad Pantoum, Mine
There was something about the trees: Their burning leaves, Curling up on the ground In a black-gray fog. Their burning leaves A dark sadness, full of regret In a black-gray fog. Dead fruit rotting on the earth: A dark sadness, full of regret, As our cold tongues inspired to speak like Dead fruit rotting on…
Expressions as Names
One basic concept in mathematics that I see students struggle with, and with which I struggled myself, is the notion of expressions. However, when we remove the mathematical component, we can see that expressions behave much like a concept that natural language speakers deal with fairly easily. So let’s start there, in natural language. You…
Sums of Positive Consecutive Integers: Proof
In my previous post, I tackled this problem: Try to express positive integers in terms of the sum of two or more consecutive positive integers. For instance, 3 = 1+2, 9 = 2+3+4, and so on. For which numbers 1 to 25 is it possible to do this? I incorrectly concluded that there were no…
Sums of Consecutive Positive Integers
Edit: The bit about the larger prime numbers was due to an error in my VBA programming, but it lead to a better understanding of the problem. Don’t take this article as “final”, is the point. This week’s puzzle in my Mathematics Reasoning class: Try to express positive integers in terms of the sum of…
The Difference of Squares
In our Mathematical Reasoning class tonight, we discussed this problem: Can your age in years be written in terms of the difference of two square numbers? If so, what two numbers? There are at least three mathematical problems contained here: Given a specific whole number (0 or a positive integer), attempt to find two square…